As long ago as last summer the Verkhovna Rada began to study the question of dual citizenship which has in fact been practiced in Ukraine for years, although the Constitution recognizes single citizenship only. The draft laws passed in the first reading provide for up to five-year imprisonment for hiding the fact of dual citizenship.
THE WAY IT ALL BEGAN
According to Anton Buteiko, one of the drafters of Ukraine’s Constitution, there were several reasons why single citizenship should be introduced. As the collapse of the Soviet Union and numerous armed conflicts in its former republics brought forth thousands of refugees and a steep rise in organized crime, this kind of emigration flow was undesirable for Ukraine. Secondly, the economy was rapidly sagging and it was increasingly difficult to ensure lawful social standards even to our own citizens, so it was not a good idea to grant Ukrainian citizenship to our former compatriots from the former Soviet republics. Finally, the authors of the Fundamental Law were also guided by the intention to protect the Ukrainian nation from being “watered down” as a result of the granting of citizenship to people of a non-indigenous ethnos.
However, this norm, too, fell victim to the outrageous flouting of laws. It emerged in the mid- and late 1990s that among those who had acquired dual citizenship were high-ranking officials (ex-premiers Yukhym Zviahilsky and Pavlo Lazarenko were issued Israeli and Panamanian passports, respectively) and oligarchs who, even though having several passports, could not travel, e.g., to the US, where they were considered tied-up with organized crime (Vadym Rabynovych).
The result is a traditional Hollywood movie scene about the “Russian mafia:” a “bad guy,” who has organized a large-scale traffic of drugs or weapons, is shown shuffling a pack of the passports of exotic countries, including Ukraine.
Incidentally, Russian State Duma member Iosif Kobzon said he had received a Ukrainian passport with permission of President Kuchma.
It is also worthwhile to recall recent verbal battles about the passports of the MP David Zhvania and Ukraine’s First Lady Kateryna Chumachenko-Yushchenko.
It will be recalled that Hennady Moskal, a comic-looking police general (a Savik Shuster talk show favorite for this reason), a no less caricatural lawmaker (he reduced experts to tears last year with his bills on combating “products of erotic and sexual nature” and “anti-Semitic actions” – he really worded it like this), and head of the State Committee for Nationalities and Migration, popped up, like the devil from hell, in 2004 and categorically demanded that the Constitution be amended to allow dual citizenship. No one knows who instilled this idea into the general’s head, but this was presumably a trial balloon floated to sound out the government and the public.
It should be noted for the sake of fairness that many ordinary people have also acquired dual citizenship – mostly for economic reasons. For example, in Northern Ukraine people also have Russian and Belarusian citizenships. The benefit is all too apparent: they travel to Russia in search of a job and to Belarus for medical treatment.
DUAL CITIZENSHIP IS A WEAPON OF THE STRONGEST
The Russian Federation recognizes dual nationality if its citizen acquired the passport of a foreign country before 2002 and (attention!) permanently resides on the territory of another state. (A similar practice exists in Greece, Switzerland, and other countries which some not very conscientious authors portray as a role model, an example to follow.) This is why Russia was also so willingly dishing out passports in the separatist regions of Georgia and the Crimea. Incidentally, on the eve of the presidential elections, the BBC beamed a report on this problem from the Crimea. The British journalists put the question point-blank: will Russia use the pretext of “defending its citizens,” as it did in Georgia, in case of a conflict in the Crimea? It should be noted, however, that it is not a Russian invention but a borrowed US experience: suffice it to recall the armed intervention in and toppling the government of Grenada in 1983 under the pretext of “defending American students.” Still, Russia had to eat dirt a few years ago, when the then Turkmenistan ruler Saparmurat Niyazov demanded that the ethic Russians who were Turkmen citizens disclaim their Russian passports.
Rumania does not conceal that it continues issuing passports to ethnic Rumanians in Ukraine. Bucharest claims that it is granting citizenship to those who were Rumanian citizens before 1940. In all probability, Rumania still considers certain Ukrainian territories as its own lost lands. The proof of this is the repeated unfriendly statements of President Basescu, which the Ukrainian government has always tried to leave unnoticed. On its part, Rumania showed acute indignation in the 1990s, when Hungary began issuing the “Hungarian Card” to ethnic Hungarians in Rumania, claiming that this will stir up separatist sentiments.
Naturally, Ukrainian citizens of Hungarian origin have also acquired the “Hungarian Card” (incidentally, there is also the “Polish Card”). This may be called ersatz citizenship because the card provides the bearer with access to the social benefits which citizens of that country enjoy, such as education, health care, etc. Links with the ancestral home country undoubtedly increases the sense of national identity and even – let us say the truth – arouses a greater loyalty to it. When President Laszlo Sojom of Hungary visited Uzhhorod 18 months ago, he said that Hungarian-language schools in Transcarpathia should teach Ukrainian “by the methods of a foreign language.” He had announced the same a month earlier in Budapest in the presence of Viktor Yushchenko – and this self-proclaimed creator of a “modern nation” said nothing in reply.
It should be noted here that Rumanian and Hungarian members of the Parliamentary Assembly, Council of Europe, keep complaining that the authorities are fomenting ethnic minority separatism, do not put up notices in the official language at schools, and hang out foreign state flags on local government buildings.
Europe took a mostly negative attitude to dual citizenship almost until the late 1990s. The countries that allowed it were, as a rule, former colonial empires, such as Spain and France, which considered dual nationality a vital instrument of influencing their former colonies. The arguments are well known: how will a dual national decide which of the two countries he or she will serve as a citizen? Another weighty argument against dual citizenship is that it allows “high-profile” criminals to legally evade prosecution by choosing as a “second fatherland” the states that do not extradite its citizens. The latest example of this is the case of Leonid Nevzlin from the notorious Yukos, who was sentenced to a life term for a string of contract killings, but Israel refuses to extradite him to Russia, where he had been convicted in absentia. Moreover, he recently shook hands with Barack Obama in the White House as member of an Israeli delegation.
Negative attitude to dual citizenship was naturally vanishing as the European Union was going stronger. The 1997 European Convention on Citizenship solved the problem of military duty for dual nationals but, according to lawyers, it sidestepped the question mobilization in the case of a war between the two states – as a matter of fact, it is not so important because the likelihood of this is hypothetical. Besides, such things as access of such dual nationals to civil service and military secrets, as well as criminal liability for high treason, are stipulated by the national law.
Finally, every state that allows dual citizenship will inevitably face the problem of dual loyalty.
DUAL LOYALTY IS WORSE THAN DUAL CITIZENSHIP
Champions of dual citizenship like to cite the example of the US, claiming that the world’s strongest power allows this. This is not true. Conservative statesmen have mobilized lately a large number of Americans against plans to legalize illegal migrants (there are millions of them there, six out of ten being Mexicans). What caused a veritable shock were the results of a poll conducted by Zogby International last fall: legalization forces other Mexicans to illegally move to the US and most of the potentially new Mexico-born US citizens intend to display more loyalty towards Mexico. Yet, the discussion, let alone criticism, of legalization plans is not being encouraged – Lou Dobbs, a leading CNN host, was recently dismissed on a charge of “xenophobia.”
IN LIEU OF CONCLUSIONS
It is clear that dual citizenship does not automatically produce dual loyalty. Naturally, the motifs that guide, for example, our job-seeker who acquires Italian citizenship radically differ from those of an official who hides his second citizenship while ranting about his personal patriotism (“He is too much pressing on patriotism – must have stolen too much” – Saltykov-Shchedrin). “This situation cannot but worry Ukraine, for it poses a threat to the state’s national security and lays the groundwork for foreign interference into the internal affairs of Ukraine,” says the explanatory note to the above-mentioned draft law on prosecution for dual citizenship. The words are right. But it is dual loyalty that chiefly lays this “groundwork for foreign interference.” The bearers of this kind of loyalty are called “firsters” in the US: this means that a certain state is first for them, but the native one is a proving ground for serving the first one. In this country, among those who may be called “firsters” is, for example, an MP who requests Moscow to appoint an assistant of the Russian president as “manager of the Russian project” in Ukraine (Vadym Kolesnychenko) and the ambassador in Washington, who seems to be playing the role of a call-boy to transmit wishes of the State Department and instructions of the Israeli lobby to Kyiv.
The indispensable measures against the “watering-down” of the nation and the state, for which the first authors of the Constitution cared, should also comprise effective laws on “foreign agents” (such as one in the US, which demands that the official or the company declare the instructions of whose government he or it follows), on lobbying practices, on the activity of national-minority and non-governmental organizations (under the guise of which foreign political lobbies often hide), and on foreign funding, particularly during the elections.
